Dec. 7 (UPI) — The International Olympic Committee announced Monday that breakdancing has been added to the medal events program at the 2024 Paris Games.
It will be the first DanceSport event to appear at an Olympic Games. Paris organizers proposed adding breakdancing to the event almost two years ago after it was staged at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires.
Breakdancing will be called “breaking” at the Olympics, which is what it was referred to in the 1970s by hip-hop pioneers in the United States.
The IOC executive board also confirmed that skateboarding, surfing and sport climbing — three events that were to debut at the postponed Tokyo Games — will be featured in Paris as well. The 2020 Tokyo Games were postponed to July 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Also Monday, the IOC announced that the 2024 Paris Games will feature a historic 100% gender equality in its athlete quotas. The 2024 event will have exactly 50% male and female participation, surpassing that of the Tokyo Games.
“With this program, we are making the Olympic Games Paris 2024 fit for the post-corona world,” IOC president Thomas Bach said in a statement Monday. “We are further reducing the cost and complexity of hosting the Games.
“While we will achieve gender equality already at the upcoming Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, we will see for the first time in Olympic history the participation of the exact same number of female athletes as male athletes. There is also a strong focus on youth.”
In addition to new sports and gender equality, the IOC said the Paris Games will consist of about 600 fewer athletes and 10 fewer events than the Tokyo Games. Boxing and weightlifting, two sports with troubled governing bodies, suffered the biggest cuts to the number of athletes they can have in Paris.